Assortment List 

Use

Retail companies are rarely organized along strictly uniform lines. As such, the individual stores often vary in size. Some stores form legal, independent units with the status of an external customer or company or take on, for example, the function of a wholesaler. All these different parts of the same company or group must be kept up-to-date with changes that affect them. Stores that replenish stocks by manual inspection require up-to-date information about the articles they can carry in their assortment (for example, the merchandise category to which an article belongs or the vendor from which an article can be procured). Stock planners often find it useful when planning new orders to have information about the last order placed. This information often has to be made available in a variety of media (printout, PC file, or EDI message) for all articles in an assortment, for articles for which changes have been made, or for an even more specific subset of data.

In SAP Retail, the assortment list fulfills this function.

Implementation Considerations

These functions are part of the business function Retail Enhancements (ISR_RETAILSYSTEM) that you usually activate with the Retail business function set.

Features

How the assortment list is used in practice differs from one company to the next. It also often has different roles in the various, individual areas of retail. For example, the structure of assortment lists in the area of food varies far more than in the area of textiles. In wholesaling, the assortment list is often used as a price list.

To allow for these different uses, the assortment list in SAP Retail is a standard solution that can be configured with a high degree of flexibility.

·        Different assortment list types can be defined (e.g., food and non-food)

·        Assortment list profiles can be assigned to sites or site groups

·        Different creation and transmission cycles can be defined

·        The assortment list can be output using a number of different media (printout, EDI, file transfer)

An assortment list can therefore easily be tailored to fit your individual company requirements.

Integration

Conventionally, an assortment list is produced as a printout. SAP Retail also supports assortment list output in the form of an electronic message for distributed retailing purposes (when a store-based merchandise management system is in place).This is done through the POS interface - outbound.

The most important part of an assortment list is the “assortment list message”, which involves the retrieval and preparation of article-related data. After a message has been prepared, it can be sent directly to other systems. Messages created in the assortment list function are structured as intermediate documents (IDocs) with segment hierarchy. The intermediate document provides the interface to other systems.

If you want to use the assortment list, you can choose between the classic version and the high performance retailing version (HRR). Depending on the version, the ERP system uses different IDoc categories:

·        The older (classic) IDoc type WBBDLD03 permits only one price per article. So if, for example, you have a September price for school notebooks and you change this price in October, the system generates two article segments for the same article, each with a different price subsegment.

·        The newer (HPR) IDoc type WBBDLD04 can handle multiple prices. In the example above, the system only uses this IDoc type to generate one article segment for school notebooks that contains both price segments. This reduces the total number of IDoc segments that need to be transmitted and therefore the amount of time needed to run the assortment list.

·        IDoc type WBBDLD05 is the same as IDoc type WBBDLD04, but also contains a segment for the article hierarchy assignment.

·        IDoc type WBBDLD06 is the same as IDoc type WBBDLD03, but also contains a segment for the article hierarchy assignment.

HPR version processes most – but not all – master data that also processes the classic report and also allows a higher processing speed. This is sufficient for most retailers. However, if you require this missing data (specifically: classification data, old labeling data, and layout modules for space management), you must implement a user exit to include this additional data.

 

See also:

POS Interface – Outbound